By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Former Democratic Congressman Barney Frank said Monday at Princeton University that the national defense budget should be cut and the money reinvested domestically to help working-class Americans who are angry that their government is not doing more for them.
From inside McCosh Hall, Mr. Frank said he would rather see the money cut from the defense budget and from ending the criminal prosecution of low-level drug users put into domestic spending to aid a country where many Americans have lost faith in government.
Mr. Frank, a leading voice on the left during his career in public life as a congressman from Massachusetts, inveighed against a view that the government is the public’s enemy. He said such a sentiment has been advanced by the leadership of the Republican Party, a view that voters hold with electoral consequences.
“The people who vote in Republican primaries have become so convinced that government is a bad thing that they are having trouble mustering support for a Republican who wants to govern,” he said.
That is playing out in selecting the next Speaker of the House and in the presidential contest, he continued.
He talked of a “vicious cycle” in which people who are angry with government then vote for political candidates “who share their anger at government” and then make things worse once they are in office.
“I am convinced that if we were to find the money to do a variety of things that would both improve the quality of life and, as part of that, also decrease inequality, you would begin to turn around this anti-government attitude,” he said.
He touted such things as lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to 55 and putting people to work on infrastructure jobs.
To fund that spending, he took aim what he called the “unsuccessful” and financially wasteful war on drugs and the defense budget. He devoted most of his comments on the second of those two ideas.
Giving a historical perspective, he said defense spending was cut in the 1990s under presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton but went up again in the George W. Bush administration.
He faulted the Bush administration, in particular Vice President Dick Cheney, for seizing “on 9/11 to build the terrorists up to be the threat equivalent of the communists and the Nazis.” In doing so, military spending returned to levels not seen since the height of the Cold War, he said.
He said current defense spending is based on a “wildly exaggerated view of what America needs to be doing in the world,” in advancing a more limited role for the nation internationally.
Mr. Frank received a warm reception from the audience inside the lecture hall on campus, later staying to sign copies of his autobiography, “Frank.”
Mr. Frank, 75, served in Congress between 1981 and 2013. He became the first member of the House to come out as gay, as he had kept his homosexuality a private matter for the first part of his life. Now sporting a beard, he has been advising the campaign of Hillary Clinton and writes a column for the website Politico.
